Five takeaways from Trump’s Manhattan sexual abuse verdict

A Manhattan jury just fired a shot heard ‘round the country. Delivering its judgment in warp speed – after a mere three hours of deliberating – a jury of six men and three women unanimously found former President Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and for defaming her by calling the charges a “hoax.” The jury found Trump not liable for raping her. Trump must pay Carroll $5 million.

The echoes reverberate beyond justice for Carroll. Here are five takeaways.

1. Courage is contagious

Carroll kept her trauma quiet for more than two decades. She said what changed her mind were the women who took personal risk in 2017 to bring charges against movie producer Harvey Weinstein. They got justice.

As Carroll told the jury in her case, “Woman after woman stood up [against Weinstein]. I thought, ‘Well, this may be a way to change the culture of sexual violence’ . . . if we all tell our stories.”

We’re social beings. We feel stronger when part of something larger than ourselves. The Black students who in 1960 sat in at segregated lunch counters got beaten, but their courage inspired others, white and Black, who believed in racial justice. They created a movement.

And so with #MeToo and Jean Carroll.

2. Justice is shared

Carroll attained justice beyond herself. Jessica Leeds testified that in the 1970s, Trump, without even a conversation, reached up her skirt from his neighboring seat on an airplane flight. Natasha Stoynoff, a former People magazine writer, testified that while she was at Mar-a-Lago in 2005 to interview Trump, he led her into a private room, shut the door and suddenly pressed against her with unwanted kissing.

He paid no price for those alleged assaults. Until now. Leeds and Stoynoff are surely feeling joy at their own role in bringing overdue accountability.

Then there were the more than 20 other women who have accused Trump of sexually assaulting them over decades. Carroll’s jury rendered vicarious justice for them — and for those across America who watched Trump escape consequences in 2016 after calling the Access Hollywood tape mere “locker room” talk and getting elected.

Political spin can’t compete with evidence in a court of law.

3. The verdict upholds law’s fundamental purposes

Human law came into being to counteract the law of the jungle, where might makes right — what historian Tom Head describes as “the rule of the strong and violent over the weak and nonviolent.” The law is meant to protect victims whose rights or personhood are invaded, and to hold the invader to account.

For those who have watched Donald Trump’s bullying persona for seven years, it should come as little surprise that he believed in using strength and violence to ravage another human being. A jury today said resolutely, “We apply the law that protects those you harmed just as we would apply it to anyone else.”

Juries in the already filed criminal case against Trump, and juries to come, will do the same.

4. A rightwing culture war narrative won’t get air

On the right, the counter to the “Me Too” movement has been to mythically dub it a “war on men.” In 2018, Tucker Carlson lamented that “men are pretty close to being destroyed” and agreed with a Fox News guest who said that the “Me Too” movement was leading to the “disappearing of men.”

In 2019, the New York Post ran an anti-Me Too column in which the author wrote, “Men find themselves accused of being part of a ‘rape culture’ merely for being men.” In 2021, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) complained that “men are being told . . . their manhood is the problem.”

Reality just struck. Donald Trump was found liable not for being male but for sexual assault that was proved to have happened.

Had the jury ruled for Trump, imagine the incalculable harm that would have been wrought on equal treatment for women as conservatives flooded the airwaves with messaging that it’s men who are being abused. Fortunately, in courtrooms facts matter, not cultural narratives made up by politicians and their enablers.

5. The judgment will damage Trump’s reelection prospects

The political harm to Trump is likely to prove long-term, not short-term. On the Republican primary trail, he will slough off the verdict as rigged. His unshakeable base will buy it.

But should he be the GOP nominee in 2024, consider the effect of back-to-back campaign ads: One reminds voters that Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who issued the broadly unpopular decision overruling Roe v. Wade; the next reminds them that he’s been judged a sexual abuser.

That brand will not play well with the suburban moms and independents who tip elections. The sound of yesterday’s verdict heard round the country will be replayed for female voters and the men who care about them. They are bound to hear it.

Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor and civil litigator, currently of counsel to Lawyers Defending American Democracy.